More time at home and less trips to restaurants and supermarkets can be equivalent to a smaller variety of meals, especially for those who do not have much culinary appetite. It was thinking about improving food planning and a balanced routine that four engineering students at Universidade Nova developed aSaveCook, an app that aims to help save time and money.
In the appp it is possible to access various recipes, share ideas and create new meals, as well as a weekly plan, building from there a shopping list.
"SaveCook was a project that emerged in quarantine and was entirely developed at a distance," said Joo Veloso, one of the team members, to SAPO TEK. "We want to optimize trips to the supermarket, try to reduce missing items and, at the same time, save whenever possible", he explains, referring that two of the team members had previous experience in developing applications for the college.
Similar to other applications, with the choice of recipes a shopping list is generated, indicating where it is possible to purchase the cheapest products. And it was here that some of the main difficulties identified by the team emerged, not only with obtaining but above all with the updating of prices.
"With the pandemic, many surfaces have invested in digital and as a consequence there has been more information available. The main difficulty was to automate the process of obtaining prices from the websites of these surfaces and comparing them. This process is not always linear, because the same article may have different quantities / measures in different stores ", justifies Joo Veloso.
The app can be obtained from theSaveCook website or directly from the Google Play store for Android and App store for iOS. Free download.